Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, November 22, 1995

'Casino" is about as weak a film as can be imagined from the team of director Martin Scorsese and actors Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.

This is not to say that the picture, which opens today, is flat- out terrible. The scene in which Joe Pesci explodes into a rage and stabs a guy to death with a ballpoint pen has its appeal. So do the confrontations between Pesci's "made guy" and De Niro's Vegas casino honcho.

But even the best De Niro- Pesci scenes in "Casino" only call to mind better ones in their other Scorsese films, "GoodFellas" and "Raging Bull." Watching them together here, in fact, is rather like watching Astaire and Rogers in their reunion picture "The Barkleys of Broadway." De Niro and Pesci are good, but this time they know they're good, and the inspiration is gone. They have one eye on us and one affectionate eye on themselves.

There is only one spot of freshness in "Casino," and that is, surprisingly, Sharon Stone. She plays Ginger, a former hooker turned glamorous hustler who becomes the wife of Ace Rothstein (De Niro). All the pre-re lease hype about Stone's performance turns out to have been accurate. Stone takes this woman from sparkling confidence to dissolution and disintegration, hitting every bump and ditch along the way.

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But Stone is just one aspect of this huge, three-hour film, which, in essence, tries to tell the history of the mob in Las Vegas in the '70s. Go in interested and you may find your interest tested way past the limit. "Casino" is not about people, just Vegas. It's an ambitious film -- but also a scattered, unfocused one.

To tell this sprawling story, Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi rely on voice-over narration. But "rely" is too weak a word. They depend on it, slavishly. They use voice-over in the way a documentary film maker might. It's an audacious move, but so is jumping off a cliff.

The persistent voice-over makes "Casino" virtually impenetrable. The first half hour is almost a solid wall of voice-over. And no sooner does it stop than it starts up again, every couple of minutes, for the length of the film.

Obviously, Scorsese has plenty he wants to tell us about Vegas and its customs. We hear all about old wise-guys in Kansas City getting weekly payoffs of $500,000; about the Teamsters' pension fund; about corrupt good-ol'-boy politicians in Vegas, and on and on. But Scorsese doesn't dramatize this.

GENUINELY SCARY SCENE

Everybody who has seen "GoodFellas" remembers the scene in which Pesci says to Ray Liotta, "Do you think I'm a clown? Do I amuse you?" It's a scary scene, but not just because Pesci is scary. It's because we like Liotta; he's our guy, the one we're following. In "Casino" there's nothing to follow but the phenomenon of gamblers and crooks knocking each other off. You care no more than you do reading about it in the newspaper.

As Ace Rothstein, De Niro is a cold, rather passive character who already has his little kingdom and is after nothing more. Rothstein's passivity is a problem. He has everything he wants, so he has nothing to work for. Yet he has no Mafia power, so as his kingdom ebbs away he can do nothing. At the center of the film is a static protagonist.

DISRUPTIVE OLD FRIEND

Ambition here takes the form of Nicky Santoro, a Mafia made- guy/maniac played by Pesci. Santoro, Rothstein's childhood pal, rocks the boat by coming to town and muscling bookies, lending money and cheating the casinos. How exactly this activity disrupts things is discussed in detail in "Casino," yet it remains vague, a thing happening mostly off-camera.

With Rothstein unable to challenge Santoro, the De Niro-Pesci clashes are lively but have a built- in limit. When made-guy Pesci screams, De Niro can only stand there. It's only in the Stone scenes that the film and De Niro come to life. And even there Rothstein is hampered, not by his wife's mob ties but by his feelings for her.

When Stone enters "Casino," she's a breezy, radiant presence, a young, gorgeous woman with a killer smile. When Rothstein gives her jewelry, her face lights up -- a little too much. Once they're married, she begins her slow slide into alcoholism and drug addiction, a slide that goes down and down and down, farther than you might ex pect.

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Stone, who has previously not seemed relaxed playing beyond her usual role as a cool customer, turns it loose. She becomes a walking nightmare, a screaming, pathetic wreck. Her tantrums are chilling, but even more impressive are the quieter scenes in which the irrationality of Ginger's thinking is clear. From here on, Stone's talent has to be taken seriously.

"Casino" spends 150 minutes working up to the orgy of violence in its last half hour. Usually, violence in Scorsese's films has a quality of ironic distance, but here the violence is nasty and personal. Even the most ardent fans of Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci could skip "Casino" and not really be missing anything.

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